Italy (ITA-0718)

This position is not currently available

An experienced and capable educator is required for an after-school support assignment, working with a 13-year-old girl. The Tutor will be required to teach a full range of British National Curriculum subjects to a standard of excellence sufficient for eventual entry to a top-class British or American school, but decisions are yet to be made as to which one of these two pathways will be taken. The Tutor will be responsible for ensuring the girl is fully prepared for both the entry exams and her academic life thereafter.

Student

The student is a lovely young lady. She is engaging, smart, attentive, and a pleasure to work with. Being the head girl in an Italian school near Padua, she is hard-working and committed. In her own small international school, she is getting top grades. However, it is clear that these good standards in her current school are well below the mean relative standards of the schools to which she intends to apply, and this is problematic if she is to succeed in a competitive entry assessment for a good London private day school.

The student recently took a practice 12+ mock exam. The results of this highlighted enormous gaps, predominantly in in her knowledge of mathematics. While more comfortable in subjects like English, a significant deficit was also uncovered there. In comparison with her peers at good English schools, it is clear that she lacks the solid academic foundations that would be expected of an able 13-year-old. In some areas, she may be as much as two years adrift relative to her British or US peers in certain areas of the curriculum. However, she is evidently extremely clever, and she’s only behind because she’s been badly taught or never actually covered parts of the curriculum before. When taught well, she catches on quickly and enjoys the feeling of accomplishment that comes with the rapid success.

The student is ambitious and highly motivated. She wants to go to a good school so that she can make a strong application to the top Universities such as Stanford, Oxford, or LSE. She benefits from great support from all sides from her family, and it is anticipated that with excellent tutoring and continued encouragement from family, she should be in a strong position to realize her academic ambitions.

As a member of a very private family, the student has been brought up surrounded by protection, nannies and a wide range of other domestic staff. This, combined with having restricted free time, has resulted in a poor ability to form healthy relationships with friends that are based on actual friendship; she tends to treat her friends like employees and tell them how they are supposed to behave. As a result, she has very few genuine friends, and she risks losing out if she cannot modify her behaviour.

It is unclear if the student is currently experiencing some form of bullying at school, as she has claimed, but it is evident that her attitude to the institution has recently changed. This may be as a result of the strong security presence, or perhaps through her own failings with friendships. Regardless, the ‘bullying’ is causing her to dislike school and actively seek out socialising opportunities with some of her less-desirable classmates, among them those who cause trouble and disrupt the classroom. This is a cycle that the Tutor must try to work on with her to help her to develop more balanced interpersonal skills.

Role of the Tutor

This role initially requires a superlative Tutor to provide the student with full time after school support while in Italy. The family have committed to moving to London in time for the start of the 2019 academic year. In her normal chronology, this would mean trying to get into a Y10 class where spaces are rare. Due to the deficits in the student’s current academic performance and her conveniently positioned birth date, she could apply to enter Y9, a more natural entry point from September 2019. Even this would require significant amounts of preparation in the short term in order to make competitive applications later this calendar year. One final option is for her to attend an American school in London from September 2019, entering into grade 9 at the start of High School.

Assuming the student should be at Y9 standard now, this role calls for an able, calm and well-qualified educator who can deliver all of the content of Y7- 9 of the British National Curriculum, up to 13+ standard, in the next academic year, and while the student remains at her current school. The Tutor should assume no knowledge from the student, and should concentrate on providing solid academic foundations along with helpful study techniques that will set the student in good stead for her future academic career. The Tutor must be someone who is good at quickly moving students up through the levels, identifying all the gaps in their knowledge and working on filling them swiftly.

The student is missing some very basic knowledge in maths. The Tutor will need to teach her about negative numbers in general, as well as indices. She also needs to learn how to rearrange basic algebraic expressions, and how to do simultaneous equations and probabilities. Coordinate geometry is completely new to her, and she has only just started Pythagorean triangles. The Tutor needs to help her with those as well as working on her multiplication tables and the conversions of fractions, decimals, and percentages. The student tends to assume she can guess the answer with no justification and then make completely irrational conclusions before she even starts trying to answer the questions. As a result, she is missing key steps in calculating the answers to mathematical questions – and this will cost her valuable points in exam situations. The Tutor should teach her about exam technique, make sure she uses the right mathematical notations and that her written numbers (especially 1, 4 and 7) are more recognisable.

As for her English, the student’s comprehension of texts diminishes with their increasing complexity and unfamiliarity. The Tutor must ensure that when she reads difficult texts, she can pronounce new words properly, understand the contexts, and answers comprehension questions correctly. The Tutor also must work with the student on her English spellings, punctuation, use of capitalised letters, and how to write with proper format depending on the purpose of the writing (such as how to lay out a letter). The family have engaged a TEFL tutor over the summer to help mitigate language issues, but this support is likely to be limited and they are looking to the long term Tutor for a more solid outcome.

The student is already fluent in Italian and will likely do well in the GCSE Italian examination. Given the need to add some weight to her applications for schools in London, the student should be prepared for the summer GCSE sitting of the GCSE Italian. The preferred candidate will have had success preparing children for this exam in the past.

In addition to helping the student lay firm foundations to ensure her academic success, the Tutor will also be responsible for her in a pastoral capacity, helping her develop friendships as opposed to buying friendships or treating people as her staff.

The Tutor should be eloquent, able to explain concepts simply, and to inspire with their enthusiasm for any given subject. They must be a natural communicator with a kind and caring disposition, and a firm-but-fair approach to their work. The Tutor should have a sense of adventure as well as a good sense of humour. They should be flexible enough in their lesson plans to allow tangential lines of enquiry to be followed, but structured enough to ensure that their lessons are not consistently hijacked. They must be able to balance excellent teaching with accurate record keeping, research and administrative skills.

An additional component of this role is to help prepare some of the family’s staff who will be accompanying the family to London. The tutoring role in this regard is to teach these staff some English so that they can understand aspects of their roles when they move in the summer of 2019.

The family is extremely private. It is therefore necessary for the Tutor to be especially discreet about their position and mindful of their responsibilities in this regard. The Tutor will be asked to sign an NDA.

Hours and Holidays

The Tutor is normally expected to work 5 days a week through the weekend and is entitled two consecutive weekdays off. Normally on schooldays, the tutoring starts from about 5pm when the student comes home from school until her dinner break, and then some time afterwards. On Fridays, the student only has half a day at school, so the tutoring can start as early as 2.30pm. The family are currently negotiating with her school about giving her less homework – or perhaps allowing her out of some other classes – so that she can have more time for her tutoring. There will be more free time for tutoring on Saturdays and Sundays, but further decisions are to be made about the exact hours.

The Tutor will be entitled to a minimum of 9 weeks (45 working days) paid vacation per annum at times convenient to the Client.

There will be a standard one-month probation period, but the probation period can be reinstated if needed as per the Terms.

Accommodation, Travel, and Miscellaneous

Furnished accommodation will be provided for the Tutor in Italy. The Client is responsible for all bills on this accommodation, save for the Tutor’s personal telephone bill. While in Italy, transport will also be covered either by the provision of public transport passes, or a small car. When the contract transfers to London, the Client will cover the cost of public transport, but no car will be provided.

The Tutor must be fit and healthy, a non-smoker, without visible piercings or tattoos.

The Tutor needs to ensure that he or she has the requisite travel and health insurance, has received the required vaccinations, and has the necessary visas.